Open Casket - Steady progress, removing the support, saying a prayer to the plaster and PVA gods

Having left the cast for a few days to start to dry out and cure, I decided to be brave and remove the supporting material this afternoon. Plaster will harden quickly, but can take days to cure - the difference being an initial solidification when the excess water is removed vs reaching full strength as the crystal matrix forms eliminating yet more water in the process. I figured that the plaster wasn't going to dry out completely and thus cure with all the packing material around it.

Removing the foam and then the plastic sheeting unleashed an avalanche of polystyrene balls which took quite a while to collect and store back in a plastic bag where they can hopefully dry completely. As I suspected, everything was still quite wet under there. 

Removing the surrounding material gave me a chance to get a much better sense of the actual shape, and the rectilinear shape was definitely part of what made the first iteration a bit dull. I was quite concerned that the upper layer of fabric was beginning to pull away from the plaster layer, so I decided to take a gamble that the upper surface of plaster was quite stable, and I gave everything a thorough coat of PVA. Stepping back once I'd done this, I was pretty happy with the result at last:

This is definitely closer to what I was trying to do. The semantics might not be quite as clear as the first version, but I think this version is better balanced with the aesthetics. I'm quite concerned that the whole thing may still be shifting, and I am prepared for the possibility that I will go down tomorrow morning and find it as flat as a pancake...

I need to leave the whole thing to 'rest' and dry out again for a bit, but the next question is really how I can stabilise this enough to transport - at the moment it is safe to slide around on the tiles, but I think it will collapse if I attempt to lift it, so I need to devise some way to support it from below. The shape is interesting, but I need to fine tune it - it looks a bit 'cape-like' at the moment. I also want to think about ragged edges. Oh, and it needs a head!

One interesting chance event was that I accidentally filled one arm with polystyrene balls:

I've toyed for a while with the idea of some sort of substance in the impression, but I was surprised by how much it made it 'pop'. I think I need to seriously consider what I might do in this direction... Dust seems like an obvious choice, but I think it would be impractical for a bunch of reasons... Maybe I put in the balls and then fix them with something and coat them? Dunno.

I'm going to continue to code the water simulation in parallel and so some experiments with the projector, so I can use the first version if necessary. I'm not sure how this version would look with the projection, but it would be something to experiment with if I can successfully scoop it off my poor kitchen floor...